Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a method for controlling the image forming apparatus, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
As an image forming apparatus, there is known a digital multifunction peripheral having a copy function that reads a document with a scanner to copy the document, and a print function that prints print data transmitted to an image forming apparatus from a personal computer (PC) via a network. In addition to the above functions, the digital multifunction peripheral has multiple functions including an image data transmission function that transmits image data read by a scanner to a PC, an image data storage function that stores image data therein so as to reuse the data, and a facsimile function using a public telephone line.
The configuration of this type of the digital multifunction peripheral has become complicated because of realizing the multi-functional configuration described above. In particular, the number of programs has increased along with complication in software structure and the capacity of a storage device for storing image data has also increased. Nowadays, it is common to mount a hard disk drive (HDD) on the digital multifunction peripheral.
An operating temperature range is specified for the HDD mounted on an image forming apparatus. The specified operating temperature range of a typical HDD is from 5° C. to 55° C. It is common to cool the HDD with a cooling fan to operate the HDD within the specified operating temperature range.
However, operating the cooling fan generates operating noise to impair the quietness of the image forming apparatus. To solve this problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-167968 discusses control that references temperature information of self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology (SMART), which is a self-diagnosis function of the HDD, to operate the cooling fan at the minimum required level according to the temperature information.
On the other hand, the HDD has a loading state in which a magnetic head is located on a disk surface and an unloading state in which the magnetic head is retracted into an area called a ramp outside the disk surface. There is defined the upper limit of the number of times of loading/unloading, which is the number of times of transition between the two states. If the number of times of the loading/unloading exceeds the upper limit, the reliability of the HDD decreases. In a typical HDD, the upper limit is 600 thousand times. If the data in the HDD is accessed or the temperature information of the SMART is read, the HDD shifts to the loading state. If the data or the SMART has not been accessed for a certain period of time, the disc head is retracted and the HDD shifts to the unloading state.
However, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-167968, the HDD shifts to the loading state when the temperature information of the SMART is read. If the preceding state is the unloading state, the number of times of the loading/unloading is increased by one. If such a transition is repeated at an interval of one minute, the number of times of loading/unloading exceeds the upper limit of 600 thousand times in a little over a year, which causes a problem that the reliability of the HDD, that is, the reliability of the image forming apparatus is lowered.